I've been enjoying a BBC radio drama recorded in 1973 of Asimov's Foundation Trilogy. The sound effects remind me of an old Doctor Who episode. Its fun to enjoy some old classical Sci-Fi. With a bit of serendipity I stumbled on to a Traveller article while perusing an old Dragon magazine that gives the specs for the Foundation planets mentioned in the series.

I immediately thought oh wouldn't it be fun to run some sort of Traveller Foundation campaign, then I thought wow that would be a pain to map out the whole thing. Why would I want to map out a whole universe of stars when my campaign idea might take place on only a few of them? Then I thought of a hand wavemum idea to deal with the whole thing. I at first thought about translating the jump number into a warp like drive and then I thought the easiest thing would be to translate the jump number into time traveled between a jump.

The base time would be six weeks in jump space, to anywhere! Distance wouldn't mater, sort of like a Dune idea of folding space, all that would matter would be having the correct coordinates. The higher the jump number equals less time in jump space, J6 would mean a jump to anywhere takes one week. Perhaps to add some danger it could also be a factor of accuracy and safety. But again you have to have the coordinates and it would be easiest to figure out a jump to a closer star then a farther one and tie a player's navigation skill to figuring that out. But for well known planets there would be the purchase of a jump cassette, meaning that a jump from Terminus (the planet of the Foundation) to Trantor (the Imperial capital) would be easy. No need to map out a whole universe!

__________________“A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” - Lao Tzu